Basically economist Noreena Hurtz set out to persuade every Premiership player to give up a day's wages for a nurses' hardship fund, which would work out at 556 players donating �1.5m. And given that the average Premiership footballer earns in two weeks what the average nurse earns in a year she understandably thought this would be achievable.

But Premiership stars depend on their performances on the pitch and not on what we may think of them as people, as with Joey Barton getting drummed out of Manchester City for beating seven bells out of a teammate and walking straight into a contract worth �12m at Newcastle. Simply put, they don't need to impress anyone with their charity work when they can command the unwavering loyalty of thousands of fans simply by performing well on the field. This had uphill task written all over it but as Hurtz admitted and frequently demonstrated she knew nothing about football or footballers. But perhaps ignorance was bliss in this situation and she couldn't have taken on this task without being totally devoid of cynicism.

Hurtz is a sort of London socialite with a track record in raising funds for good causes. At the very least she has an impressive set of contacts in her Blackberry, all of whom had absolutely no connection with football whatsoever, and so she set about calling them all and asking if any of them knew any Premiership players. Apparently she was utterly unaware that clubs have press offices and PR departments. And so her first port of call en-route to the Premiership ended up being attending a Burnley match with Alistair Campbell. If we were worried about her lack of soccer savvy before this, it was about to get worse. Campbell asked her if she knew what a nutmeg was, and when she said no, he explained, "It's when you put the ball through someone's legs." Sounding shocked she exclaimed, "Isn't that illegal?"

After that Noreena's progress and the programme's momentum lagged terribly. She got kind words but little else from Gianluca Vialli and Jamie Redknapp, a day's wages from Andy Gray and lip service from Mohamed Al Fayed. It took another meeting with Campbell to get her into gear as he pointed out it should be easy for her and a TV crew to shame people into helping such a good cause and admonished her for her shocking lack of progress over the course of a few months. When she texted him later to say thanks he replied, "Waste of a text message. Get on with it."

Thankfully she did, although assistance came from a surprising source. West Ham's Nigel Reo-Coker, seem by many as the very definition of the Baby Bentley scene, contacted her to say his mum was a nurse and he'd like to help, going so far as to help her (finally) launch her campaign to the public.

Even with Reo-Coker's assistance progress remained agonisingly slow.

The West Ham, Blackburn, Fulham and Reading squads signed up in their entirety, but then came a tragicomic meeting with Newcastle manager Glenn Roeder.

Having survived a brain tumour four years earlier Roeder had the height of respect for nurses and was eager to help, but had an unfortunate habit of sounding like a tree-hugging, tie-dyed hippie while talking about it, cutting off some of her oh-woe-isme ramblings at one stage with a stern, "There's no such word as 'can't', " thereby immediately disproving his own point.

As she was leaving he gave her a printout of a poem to read. The basic gist of it was 'seize the day' and it concluded, "Don't be afraid your life will end, be afraid that it will never begin." A nice sentiment, the impact of which was slightly dampened by the fact that at the end of the sheet it said, "Send this to all your friends in five minutes and a miracle will happen tonight." As Roeder drove off Noreena surmised that he seemed like the kind of manager who had a lot of clout with his team and that she couldn't be in safer hands. He resigned four days later.

And then, bizarrely, things came together for her. Having struggled to get 100 players, with the last day of the season looming she sent off an email with the ingenious ruse of using CAPITAL LETTERS to GET HER MESSAGE ACROSS. Apparently she should have tried this earlier. Voiceover Guy proudly told us that her final list of participating players shot to 255, giving the fund over �750,000. Quite how this happened is unclear, but the shoddy editing was just another disappointing aspect of a dispiriting programme.

Hurtz seemed to think that wealthy people should be very keen to participate but never properly broached the fact that she was just one in a long queue of people looking for charity help from footballers. Even at that, it's depressing to hear that the entire Watford squad signed up, while no one from Chelsea did and only two (Ryan Giggs and Gary Neville) from Manchester United.

The only positive aspect to the whole farrago was that Hurtz at least got people talking and raised awareness of the plight of nurses. But if karma exists the entire Chelsea squad will be fetched up in hospital over the next few weeks with food poisoning or some such. Let's hope they don't mind fluffing their own pillows.